Embodiments of the present invention are directed to drug delivery devices, and more particularly, to a method for accurately detecting and reporting self-administration of a drug delivery device.
Many patients are required to self-administer medications, such as through self-injection devices, inhalers, or other like drug delivery devices. Often, it is important that the patient adhere to particular dosing schedules in order for treatment to be effective. With the widespread use of smartphones, patients are able to record and even report, to doctors or other like healthcare entities, individual dosage administrations. In many cases, patients can not only record and report the time a dose is administered, but the name of the medication, the dosage amount, and other like, relevant data. This enables medical professionals to better track patient adherence. Some companies even establish rewards programs that offer incentives to patients to adhere to their medication schedule by tracking their dosage administrations with their smartphones.
However, it can be difficult to determine whether the medication has actually been taken by the patient. For example, some applications require the patient to manually enter information using their smartphones, which creates an opportunity for false reporting. Similarly, some drug delivery devices have been equipped with bar codes or other machine readable tags that can be scanned by the smartphone to enable the recording and reporting. While more convenient than manual data entry, the machine readable codes also generally do not provide more certainty as to whether the drug delivery device had actually been used. Attempts have been made to rectify this issue, such as through the use of RFID tags which become activated upon use of the drug delivery device. Yet, such methods typically require costly and burdensome modifications to the drug delivery device by the manufacturer.
It is therefore desirable to provide a method for enabling a patient to record and report medication schedule adherence while reliably ensuring that the drug delivery device being reported has actually been used, without the need for significant modification to the actual drug delivery device. It is further desirable to also provide healthcare facilities with a method for tracking administration of medications to patients by its doctors, nurses, and the like.